


Hush, Little Sherlock, Don't Say a Word

by nympheline



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-16
Updated: 2012-03-16
Packaged: 2017-11-02 01:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/363555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nympheline/pseuds/nympheline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by whereisfic's tumblr post wondering what it would be like if Mycroft really loved his baby brother. Almost entirely a family feel-good fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mycroft's Going to Buy You a Mockingbird

**Author's Note:**

> On Tumblr whereisfic wrote, 
> 
> "Hush little Sherlock, don’t say a word  
> Mycroft will buy you a mocking bird
> 
> And if that mocking bird won’t sing,  
> Mycroft will buy you a diamond ring
> 
> And if that diamond ring turns brass,  
> You’ll get a magnifying glass
> 
> If the magnifying glass gets broke(n)  
> Mycroft will buy you a great big coat
> 
> And if that great big coat gets torn  
> You’ll get a soldier old and worn"
> 
> This is how I think that goes in prose. Endless thanks to Tsubame for all her patience and editing skills.

William and Violet Holmes never fought, both believing it to be beneath their dignity. Instead, they preserved vicious, icy silences that cast a pall over the house and all its inhabitants. Even the butler spoke in murmurs and the housekeeper in whispers, while the maids could not be persuaded to vocalise at all, but made terrified curtseys and communicated via twitchy nods and shakes of their sleek heads. All eyes in the house flicked towards the missus, steadily and silently sipping tea from her celadon set while looking everywhere but her husband; every mind counted the minutes since Sir William looked up from his paper to narrate the news for the purposes of prompting his wife’s acerbic commentary.

It suited Mycroft down to the ground. When all was well, others’ petty considerations often drowned out his own symphony of thoughts. Lily building up the fire while wondering whether the butcher’s boy really meant all he said at the village dance on Friday, and planning how she could get away with wearing her satin tap pants to see him this week without Deborah noticing and mocking her to the whole staff, could delay his train of thought fifteen whole minutes. But it worked not so well for Sherlock, who was all of six when his parents began their extended campaign of verbal starvation. Mycroft came home from school, his head full of the visiting MP’s speech to the third form, and found his brother lying bewildered and near catatonic in the stables.

“Sherlock?” Mycroft hunkered down and peered at the form squeezed under the bench in the tack room. “I’m home.”

An explosion of small boy launched itself into Mycroft’s arms, bowling them both over onto the rough floor. Tears streaking down chubby cheeks and snot travelling in runnels over trembling lips turned the Raphaelite cherub into a real boy. Mycroft, oblivious to the threat his little brother’s bodily fluids posed to his bluer, lay on the floor and stroked the rough curls until Sherlock’s shoulders stilled their heaving and his weeping diminished into hiccups.

“Are you ready to get up now?” Mycroft asked.

“No.” Sherlock’s favourite word.

“Okay.” perhaps Mycroft’s least favourite word, but the only possible response when the person you love most in the world is using you as a combination security blanket and bear rug.

Sherlock sucked on his lower lip and gripped more wrinkles into his brother’s jacket. “Mycroft?”

“Yes, Curly?”

“Are Mummy and Dad going to get divorced?”

Mycroft exhaled slowly, breathed in the smell of horses, sweat, and Sherlock, and said three words he almost never used in succession. “I don’t know.”

He could feel Sherlock’s forehead contract into a frown through his grimy shirt. “Well, think it out,” Sherlock said, imperious and impatient as ever.

Mycroft thought. He mapped the current situation, factored in two probabilities based on the car’s hubcaps and his mother’s shoes, extrapolated, and verbalised the scenario that would cause his little brother the least pain. “Yes.”

“I don’t want to live with Dad, I want to live with Mummy and I want to live with you.”

Mycroft bit his lip. “Sherlock, love, I’m the heir. I’d have to stay with Dad.”

“No!”

“Hush,” Mycroft said, hugging his wriggling brother tighter. “Plenty of people live with their dads instead of their mums, and they like it. Mummy wouldn’t go very far away,” he said, speaking aloud the thoughts as they arrived neatly at the forefront of his conscious mind. “She would stay with Auntie Edna for a fortnight before taking up permanent residence at the house in London. Garrett and Mrs. Garrett would go with her, and we would see her every Boxing Day and over the Easter hols, and for weeks in the summer. We could get a kite, like Benjamin Franklin, and fly it at Regent’s Park.”

Sherlock resembled nothing so much as a prostrate mule.

“And we could build models of the _Adventure_ and the _Ranger_ and sail them at Kensington gardens. You would be Blackbeard, of course.”

A perceptible thaw. And, typical Sherlock, give the boy an inch and he’d take a colony. “But you would have to let me win. And we could make a head out of bread and cover it in raspberry sauce and hang it from the bowsprit of the _Ranger_ while we sailed to Virginia and conquered it. And then we could hang the governor. And eat your head.”

Mycroft swallowed a chuckle. “Only if it has currants in it.”

Sherlock considered the anatomical implications of that amendment.

“Oy, stop counting my spots!”

They both burst into giggles and rolled around on the hard packed floor, Mycroft tickling within an inch of his life and Sherlock threatening Mycroft’s bed with itching powder, a colony of hedgehogs he uncovered in the garden, and the bottle of hot sauce Mummy brought back from India.

*****

Mycroft loosened the covers and sat down on his little brother’s bed, a book hidden behind his back. Sherlock eyed him suspiciously.

“What is it?”

Sherlock’s glare could have fried a lesser boy’s brain stem. “That’s not _Under the Black Flag_.”

Mycroft smoothed his features into a semblance of guilelessness. “I thought we could try something different. Put an extension on your mind hovel.”

“Mind palace, you twerp. It’s not the Bible again, is it?”

“Now, Sherlock.” Mycroft fixed his brother with a stern gaze. “Despite your persistent lack of faith in a power greater than your own, it is nonetheless useful to familiarise yourself with the tropes that influenced literature, politics, and human relationships for thousands of years. But no,” he said, holding up his hand before Sherlock could protest, “it is not the Bible. It’s American.”

“Is that supposed to be better? Americans are the only people more deluded than the Christians. No doubt a result of the demographic overlap.” 

“Shut up. I’m the reader, so I choose. When you read tomorrow night, we can go back to Cordingly.” he brought the book forward and started to open it.

“ _To Kill a Mockingbird_?” Sherlock apparently spent part of the last term learning to read upside down. “That sounds suspiciously like fiction.”

“It is, like all great literature, a series of true stories disguised as lies.”

“Boring.”

“It’s a book about a brilliant older brother who tolerates his snot of a sibling following him around while he torments the neighbours.”

Sherlock’s silence was assent. Mycroft took a moment to savour the first crack of the book’s spine and the smell of fresh paper. Then he cleared his throat and began to read. “‘When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow…’”


	2. Mycroft's Going To Give You a Diamond Ring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr whereisfic wrote,
> 
> "Hush little Sherlock, don’t say a word  
> Mycroft will buy you a mocking bird
> 
> And if that mocking bird won’t sing,  
> Mycroft will buy you a diamond ring
> 
> And if that diamond ring turns brass,  
> You’ll get a magnifying glass
> 
> If the magnifying glass gets broke(n)  
> Mycroft will buy you a great big coat
> 
> And if that great big coat gets torn  
> You’ll get a soldier old and worn"
> 
> This is how I think that goes in prose. Endless thanks to Tsubame for all her patience and editing skills.
> 
> The events in this chapter occur several years after the events in chapter 1.

A cigarette gave Mycroft’s mouth something to do beside tremble. He lit four in a row before the boy next to him spoke.

“Four is the number of death in Chinese culture.”

Mycroft passed the cigarette over to his little brother and lit another. They watched the village lights flicker on one by one as the sun set. “I got us a therapist,” Mycroft said, stubbing the tip of his spent cigarette out in the palm of his leather glove.

Sherlock snorted, smoke and breath mingling together in the night air.

“Our first appointment is tomorrow, eight o’ clock.”

“Bit premature, isn’t it, brother dear? Haven’t even had the funerals yet. Can’t wait to get over it all?”

“You—” Mycroft swallowed his ire along with his pride and a mouthful of bile.

Sherlock waited for the initial sting to fade. Then he said, “You said they were going to get divorced.”

Mycroft closed his eyes. It was no darker in his mind than in the real world. “I lied.”

“I was six.”

“Quite.”

Sherlock stretched out on the cold ground, gripping tufts of brown grass in his lambskin gloves and ripping them from the earth. “I figured it out,” he said finally. “ _To Kill a Mockingbird_. Very clever.”

About half the time Sherlock said “very clever,” he meant it. The other half of the time, he meant, “I hate you, you twit.” Mycroft decided that the two were not mutually exclusive. “Figured it out?”

“Don’t repeat yourself. Everyone else does it to give themselves time to think of what to say. You do it because you think I’m stupid and you want me to think about what I said.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Well, I am,” said Sherlock, for the first time in his life. “I’m stupid. I believed you when you said they were going to get divorced, and I believed you when you said Mummy and we would live happily ever after in the city, and I believed you when you said _To Kill a Mockingbird_ was about two children wreaking minor havoc on their conservative American neighbourhood.”

Mycroft wondered if he could locate a laser eye surgeon so inept that he would never have to see the look on his brother’s face ever again. “It is about two children wreaking minor havoc on their conservative American neighbourhood.”

“It’s about two children with a dead mother. Two children living with their emotionally absent father, whose misplaced pride and ideals lead him to stand before the world and ruin a hysterical, lonely woman.”

“That, too.”

“I would have preferred the Bible.”

Mycroft could have cried, but he chose to laugh. Sherlock chose to leave.

*****

Sherlock discovered their mother. Mycroft discovered their father. To this day, neither brother is sure which of them had it worse.

*****

Mycroft was much too important to flop on the couch and maintain his dignity, so he sent his assistant away before he did so.

“Gay,” Sherlock noted, mostly to annoy his brother.

“Don’t be reductive,” said Mycroft. “Anthony is beyond anything your petty little brain could deduce.”

Sherlock evaluated constructive criticism on a case-by-case basis. On principle, Mycroft’s pearls of wisdom ended up in the spam folder, where Sherlock could, in theory, sort through them later. Sherlock estimated that “later” would happen approximately a fortnight after “never,” but he held on to them just in case.

“I have something for you.” Mycroft wrestled a small blue box from the inner pocket of his jacket and held it out to his brother.

“Oh, Mycroft, how romantic.” Sherlock batted his eyelashes and twisted his mouth into a rictus of excitement. “Not to mention incestuous and illegal. Plus, you didn’t get on one knee.”

“Shut up and take it, you mouthy little brat.”

“Do you kiss your queen with that mouth?” but Sherlock shook the jewellery box like a child on Christmas Eve and opened it anyway. For his mother, for his grief-stricken brother, for his own satisfaction in feeling the velvet clamshell spring open. “Mummy’s engagement ring. How predictable.”

Mycroft said nothing.

“Should I wonder why you didn’t keep this for yourself, as close to her as you were? Should I deduce that you were somehow responsible, inadvertently or maliciously or solicitously, for revealing our progenitors’ sexual escapades, each to the other? To only one? Should I see the concealer by your yet-young eyes, the over-caffeinated tremor in your capable hands, and determine that your well placed guilt will lead you to rid yourself, heirloom by treasure by antique, of every vestige of the Holmes estate? That you’ll pull together some poor, trumped up buffoon of an heir who will raze almost a thousand years of family and tradition to the ground while you go off gallivanting through the government and flirting with foreign powers?”

Mycroft muted his brother until he saw Sherlock’s mouth cease its bitter litany. It didn’t bless Mycroft with ignorance; one of the requirements for his position was lip-reading. Still, somehow the hurt was less if he could not hear the actual words. “Mummy wanted it to be worn by the next Holmes woman,” he said. He straightened his tie and thought of all the hands that had done it for him in the past five years, of George, Gareth, James, Charles… and Anthony, Anthony, Anthony. Mycroft stood, looked into his brother’s eyes, and lied to him again. “And as you can see, brother dear, I’m married to my work.”


	3. You Will Get a Magnifying Glass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr whereisfic wrote,
> 
> "Hush little Sherlock, don’t say a word  
> Mycroft will buy you a mocking bird
> 
> And if that mocking bird won’t sing,  
> Mycroft will buy you a diamond ring
> 
> And if that diamond ring turns brass,  
> You’ll get a magnifying glass
> 
> If the magnifying glass gets broke(n)  
> Mycroft will buy you a great big coat
> 
> And if that great big coat gets torn  
> You’ll get a soldier old and worn"
> 
> This is how I think that goes in prose. Endless thanks to Tsubame for all her patience and editing skills.  
> Chonologically, the events in this chapter occur between chapters 1 and 2.

“‘The scout or prospector therefore requires no high-powered microscope or other cumbersome field apparatus for identifying the various limonite products. The ordinary hand lens, a good eye for detail, and a thorough acquaintance with the features which characterize the different limonite types, are all that is ordinarily needed…’”

Sherlock snored extravagantly, and Mycroft lay the book down with relief. Geology, the latest of his little brother’s obsessions, interested the older Holmes boy about as much as knitting. Maybe less. Definitely less. Mycroft tucked the covers closer around his brother, switched on the baby monitor he’d brought with him, and pushed it under the bed. Then he headed to the kitchens for a snack.

Violet Holmes sat at the servants’ table with Mrs. Garrett, both of them cackling like villains over their cocoa dregs. Mrs. Garrett caught her breath first and stood, sighing, a tired smile on her dried apple face. “Well, then, I’m for bed. Every day’s a long one when we’re up this late.” 

“Please, Mrs. Garrett.” Mycroft held out a hand. “Don’t go on my account.”

“Don’t be silly, Master Mycroft,” she said, smiling at him fondly. “I’m going on my account. Garrett’ll be cross as a trod-on cat if I’m not up by midnight, and when he’s cross, I’m cross, and when I’m cross, my cooking suffers. Strawberry scones’re in the cupboard if you want them, but I figured you’d be after the red velvet, so there’s a plate and slice right on the table for you. Good night, now.”

“Come sit by me, darling.” Violet stretched out her arm, and Mycroft leaned against his mother with a sigh. She squeezed him briefly, then swiped a finger full of frosting off his cake and sat back. “Sherlock all right, then?”

Mycroft spoke around a mouthful of sponge. “Not a peep out of him so far.”

“Does he know about the radio yet?”

Mycroft shrugged. “Probably. He’s a Holmes, the latest in a line of brilliant, imaginative paranoiacs.”

Violet snorted. “Yes, well, the brilliant, imaginative paranoiac I birthed first didn’t find my cleverly placed spy equipment until he was twelve.”

“Sherlock’s smarter.”

Violet raised an immaculate eyebrow. “You can’t mean that.”

“He is. I’m more intelligent. He’s smarter.”

“Semantics, my son. You’re looking through the rosy glasses of love, and if you don’t fell the scales from those pretty blue eyes of yours, your little brother will be the death of you.”

“I love it when you go sentimental on me, Mummy. You get all flustered and mix metaphors so very appallingly. Though, I grant you,” Mycroft said, crossing the kitchen for a glass of milk, “he very nearly killed me with boredom tonight.”

“Wasn’t it your turn to read?”

“I gave him tonight’s choice of reading material in return for him eating his vegetables.”

“You’re a terrible negotiator.”

“But an exemplary brother.”

“Can’t argue there. So what did you end up narrating, you paragon of fraternal virtue?”

“Blanchard’s _Interpretation of Leached Outcrops_.”

“Fascinating. I expect you to rejoin with reading material appropriate to his age group and not his intellect. I recommend Nancy Drew.”

“It’ll be my first choice after I take up literary sadomasochism.” He stood and kissed his mother’s hair. “Good night, Mummy.”

“Good night, dear.”

A crackle of static, and Sherlock’s voice sounded tinnily from Mycroft’s pocket. “Mycroft, bring me the benzocaine. I’ve lost a tooth.”

Mycroft grinned. “I told you he knew about the radio.”

*****

“Here you go, Curly.” Mycroft tossed the tube of gel on the bed and tilted his brother’s chin up. “Let me see. Oh, very nice, indeed. Blood everywhere. Well, good thing I brought a flannel.” He wiped gently at Sherlock’s cheeks, just beginning to lose their baby roundness, and his already stubborn chin. “Open the benzocaine.”

Sherlock squirted a small amount of clear gel onto his brother’s latex covered finger and sighed in relief as Mycroft applied anaesthetic to the gap on his bottom gum. “Thank you,” he said.

“You are most welcome, you pansy,” Mycroft said, with a theatrical snap as he removed his rubber glove. “Really, anaesthetic for a lost tooth? Your tolerance for pain is pathetic.”

Sherlock glared. “My tolerance for pain is exemplary. My patience with it is non-existent. Pain is distracting, and I see no need to suffer it at my tender age. Especially not in a first world country.”

Mycroft capped the benzocaine. “What did you do with the tooth?”

Sherlock hesitated, then held it out. “I considered swallowing it, so I could leech as many minerals from it as possible. Or crushing it up and looking at it under a microscope. But then I thought that you might like to have it.”

Mycroft took the little bloody bone with grave ceremony and wrapped it carefully in his handkerchief. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

Sherlock looked proud of himself. “I know. And we don’t have a microscope.”

Mycroft couldn’t help but laugh. “Tell you what. I still have some of my baby teeth in my room. I’ll give you one tomorrow, if you promise to crush it up or keep it instead of eating it.”

Sherlock looked genuinely touched. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Gee,” said Sherlock, reduced to slang by sentiment. “Thanks, Mycroft.”

“You’re welcome, Sherlock. Good night.”

“‘Night.”

*****

“Mummy Daddy Mummy Daddy!” Sherlock’s voice rebounded off the walls as he ran the length of the hallway, slid down the banister, and skidded to a halt in front of the dining table. “Look what was under my pillow!”

“Oh, my,” said Violet, setting her tea down carefully and peering at her youngest son. “Did the Tooth Fairy leave you that?”

The look of offended outrage on Sherlock’s face nearly made Mycroft choke on his toast. 

“There is no such thing as the Tooth Fairy,” Sherlock explained slowly, painfully, to his mother, who had to clench her jaw shut in order to trap the laughter that threatened to scar her son for life. “The Tooth Fairy is a fanciful construct designed to help sub-standard children accept pain as an inevitability. This,” he said, beaming at his brother, “is a gift from Mycroft, rewarding me for my successful expression of gratitude and affection.”

Mycroft studiously avoided his mother’s glance.

“Thank you, Mycroft,” said Sherlock, padding out of the room in his footed pyjamas. “It will be extremely helpful when I am differentiating limonite types in the field.”

Violet counted silently to a hundred before she spoke to her eldest son. “That,” she said tightly, “looked remarkably like a magnifier.”

Mycroft met his mother’s glare unabashedly. “It did.”

“It looked remarkably like an illuminated magnifier with an aspheric lens that I bought for my firstborn so that he wouldn’t make a fool of himself in chem lab.”

Mycroft shrugged. “I needed a hand lens on short notice. The only other one in the house is Great-grandfather Vernet’s ormolu magnifier, and that one won’t fit in Sherlock’s pocket.”

Violet sighed and reached for her tea. “You’re training him like a dog.”

“We are, at our basest selves, mere animals searching for affection and validation.”

“Yes, well,” said Violet, sulking into her cup, “you’re lucky I’m lonely and you’re my favourite. Otherwise I’d be angry with you for days.”

*****

Dear Mycroft,

You may have noticed that at the end of your last visit, Sherlock had taken to dropping hints about the necessity of a microscope. As you did not make one materialise in his bedclothes before your departure, he has pulled out all of his remaining baby teeth, placed them in a cigar box, and left them on your bed. Surprise!

He looks like Benjamin Button, and has developed the most endearing little juvenile lisp.

Thought you might like to know.

Ever your loving and furious,  
Mummy


End file.
